In Security and Trust Engineering our research and development work is mainly focused on: Network & Internet Security, Cloud and SOA-Security (SOA - Service Oriented Architectures) and Security Awareness.

Remote collaboration systems are a necessity for geographically dispersed teams in achieving a common goal. Realtime groupware systems frequently provide a shared workspace where users interact with shared artifacts. However, a shared workspace is often not enough for maintaining the awareness of other users. Video conferencing can create a visual context simplifying the user’s communication and understanding. In addition, flexible working modes and modern communication systems allow users to work at any time at any location. It is therefore desirable that a groupware system can run on users’ everyday devices, such as smartphones and tablets, in the same way as on traditional desktop hardware. We present a standards compliant, web browser-based realtime remote collaboration system that includes WebRTC-based video conferencing. It allows a full-body video setup where everyone can see what other participants are doing and where they are pointing in the shared workspace. In contrast to standard WebRTC’s peer-to-peer architecture, our system implements a star topology WebRTC video conferencing. In this way, our solution improves network bandwidth efficiency from a linear to a constant network upstream consumption.

Prototypes help people to externalize their ideas and are a basic element for gathering feedback on an early product design. Prototyping is oftentimes a team-based method traditionally involving physical and analog tools. At the same time, collaboration among geographically dispersed team members becomes more and more standard practice for companies and research teams. Therefore, a growing need arises for collaborative prototyping environments. We present a standards compliant, web browser-based real-time remote 3D modeling system. We utilize cross-platform WebGL rendering API for hardware accelerated visualization of 3D models. Synchronization relies on WebSocket-based message interchange over a centralized Node.js real-time collaboration server. In a first co-located user test, participants were able to rebuild physical prototypes without having prior knowledge of the system. This way, the provided system design and its implementation can serve as a basis for visual real-time collaboration systems available across a multitude of hardware devices.

In modern computer systems, multicore processors are prevalent, even on mobile devices. Since JavaScript WebWorkers provide execution parallelism in a web browser, they can help utilize multicore CPUs more effectively. However, WebWorker limitations include a lack of access to web browser's native XML processing capabilities and related Document Object Model (DOM). We present a JavaScript DOM and XML processing implementation that adds missing APIs to WebWorkers. This way, it is possible to use JavaScript code that relies on native APIs within WebWorkers. We show and evaluate the seamless integration of an external XMPP library to enable parallel network data and user input processing in a web based real-time remote collaboration system. Evaluation shows that our XML processing solution has the same linear execution time complexity as its native API counterparts. The proposed JavaScript solution is a general approach to enable parallel XML data processing within web browser-based applications. By implementing standards compliant DOM interfaces, our implementation is useful for existing libraries and applications to leverage the processing power of multicore systems.

Design Thinking and Massive Open Online Courses (MOOCs) have enjoyed a widespread attention and uptake by both institutes of higher education and media. These two increasingly popular phenomena have joined forces in the recent years with several reputable universities offering MOOCs on Design Thinking. However the MOOC model of learning and Design Thinking education seem very contradictory at the first glance: Design Thinking is taught in a learning-by-doing fashion in small teams and through various hands-on activities. In contrast, MOOCs are most often completed individually. Hence the seemingly unfitting characteristics of MOOCs and Design Thinking are worth further investigation. This paper presents the initial stage of a research project that explores the potential of teaching Design Thinking at scale. It offers a pedagogical evaluation of the existing Design Thinking MOOCs using the Taxonomy Table and the Seven Principles of Good Practice in Undergraduate Education. The results shed light on how Design Thinking is being taught today in a MOOC environment and the learning objectives that the course providers are expecting.

To a large extend, collaboration and communication consists of the understanding of extrinsic activity. This task is especially hard to achieve in remote settings or also locally when people cannot take part in meetings. In this paper we are addressing the question, if understanding of the essential decisions, facts, and processes can be achieved by just consuming collaboration data afterwards. Therefore, we take existing experiment recordings and make them explorable by the Tele-Board History Browser. Participants had a given time frame to answer content-related questions for a design thinking session. We found out that people are able to review those creative sessions and grasp the essential key points in the past work processes. Still, people are approaching the data differently depending on their personal preferences and their general process knowledge. It turns out that our approach can help distributed teams in working closer together beyond conference calls or shared documents. From our perspective, traceability of past interactions can substantially ease remote collaboration, especially in creative settings.

User-centered designers often seek to synthesize data from user research into insights and a shared point of view among team members. This paper explores the synthesis process and opportunities for providing computational support. First, we present interviews with novice and expert designers on the common practices and challenges of syn-thesis. Based on these interviews, we developed digital whiteboard software support for sorting individual seg-ments of user research. The system separates out individual and group activity and helps the team externalize and syn-thesize their different views of the data. Through a case study, we explore two computer-supported approaches: a structured condition that externalizes the different perspec-tives on the data of each team member and an unstructured condition that allows each member to organize data into clusters. Novice designers tended to prefer the structured synthesis process, while more experienced designers pre-ferred to freely arrange information segments and create clusters on their own. We provide implications for design education and support tools for user research synthesis.

Köppen, E., Meinel, C.: Empathy in the Workplace – The Employee as a Relationship Manager.Proceedings of the 11th conference of the European Sociological Association (ESA 2013). , Torino, Italy (2013).

Köppen, E., Rauth, I., Schnjakin, M., Meinel, C.: The Importance of Empathy in IT Projects: A Case Study on the Development of the German Electronic Identity Card.Proceedings of the 18th International Conference on Engineering Design(ICED 2011). , Copenhagen, Denmark (2011).